The Watery Part of the World (12 page)

Whaley squeezed the rag until water ran down her arm.

“All I do is support you. While you screw some boy in plain daylight for all the children on the island to watch and run up and down telling everyone how they saw the two of you going at it in the dunes. I support you while you run off and get drunk and throw yourself all over Barry Railey, who's got a wife and three young'uns up in Suffolk …”

“Who said I threw myself at him? Mary Alice told you I threw myself at him?”

“Don't even go denying it. Mary Alice told me the whole story not a half hour ago.”

“I don't have to listen to your mess either,” said Maggie. She rose from the table, carried her bowl of oatmeal to the sink, sloshed water in it so wildly that a stream from the pump ricocheted off the basin and sprayed over her shoulder, onto the floor. Whaley was upside her, grabbing the bowl,
gimme that, you're not even fit to wash a dish,
and Maggie was all over her sister then, slapping at her with wild loping swings, pushing her back upside the counter, both of them crying, Maggie's hair streaming wet with tears and sweat and then she was outside, running down to the creek to Woodrow's. Sarah was sitting on the porch listening to her gospel songs on the radio, Maggie could hear the sleek, sexy guitar chords chugging along underneath the swelling chorus praising God in heaven.

In the summer kitchen she lay down across the bed she shared with Boyd and said his name. She wanted him with her and she prayed a sobbing prayer to God:
Please bring him back to me I won't ever run out on him I will be faithful and good to him and forgive me for what I did to my sister who I know loves me in some long-dry place in her heart. If you just bring him back, please God don't let him leave me.

He came back late that night to find her passed out in her clothes, the screen door carelessly ajar and the summer kitchen as-warm with mosquitoes. He lit a fire in the trash burner Woodrow had installed for Crawl and his bride and pulled down the storm
boards on all the windows and lit one of the El Reeso Sweets he'd brought back for Woodrow. He stripped to his shorts and sat sweating and blowing smoke defensively around the room. He let her sleep. When she woke she was thirsty and her skin was ravaged by bites.

He was lying beside her smoking.

“Hey baby,” he said.

She rolled right over on top of him and was out of her dress in seconds. Later, lying parched and eaten up with mosquito bites and remorse alongside him as he smoked, she wanted him to ask her to go across with him, so she could say yes, for she would have then, and she would have made him leave that very evening, before she could feel better and change her mind. But he didn't ask. He seemed removed, distant, in a way she'd never seen him before. As if a part of him, his heart—the important part—had remained off island.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I messed up.”

“What happened?”

She sighed. “Can we open some of the windows now?”

He got up and busied himself with the storm boards but did so reluctantly, as if cooping them up in the sticky heat with the mosquitoes she'd let in was part of her punishment.

“You don't want to tell me,” he said from across the room.

She was holding a sock she'd dipped in water to her head and breathing hot and fast.

“I just don't like it when you're gone,” she said. “I'm sorry.”

“Quit saying that. I know you're sorry. I can tell by looking at you that you wish you hadn't done it. Thing is, what did you do?”

She reached for the water he'd brought in, drained the glass, stared defiantly at the emptiness as if willing it to refill.

“Had a little too much to drink,” she said.

“I can see that.”

“Slapped the hell out of my sister.”

“Well,” he said, “isn't that something you'd do stone sober?”

“Think about it all the time.”

“I used to beat up and get beat up by my brothers every other day.”

“Stops usually when you get into your twenties, though, doesn't it?”

They had a sad laugh over this. In the wake of the laughter she considered telling him about Barry Railey. Chances were he'd hear it, for if Mary Alice went and told Whaley down at the store, everyone had heard it by now. On the other hand, maybe he wouldn't hear of it, and would it not be better this time if he didn't know? Wasn't it hard enough for him to come back to find her smelly and pathetic?

“I've got to get up at the crack,” he said. “We better get to bed.”

The next morning, after getting up with Boyd to accompany him down to his boat — hugging on him so long and hard he had to gently pry her fingers off his shoulders—she was struck with terror that everything seemed about to crumble. What she wanted more than anything was for him to reassure her that things were
going to be okay. Boyd seemed both unnerved and flattered by her neediness. He was willing to nurse her back to normalcy, but she could tell he found the whole process unpleasant.

When she got to the house Whaley was sitting on the porch with her coffee. She would not look at Maggie when Maggie took a seat beside her.

“I'm sorry, okay?”

“Okay what?”

Maggie had no answer for this, though she understood the question.

“I would tell you what happened with Barry Railey if I thought you wanted to hear it.”

“Spare me,” said Whaley.

“All right. I'll spare you, but what you're getting spared is the truth.”

Whaley looked at her full-on for the first time that day. “You need a bath, Mag.”

For the next week or so, Maggie was tentative and shy around both Whaley and Boyd. She spent hours weeding the garden and cooked dinner for Boyd every noon when he came in off the water, more to take her mind off things than at attempt to redress her wrongs, for Whaley'd just as soon let it go than speak of it again, though she'd never forget—Maggie knew her sins were tallied in that place where her sister kept score, a book of pages filled to the margins with black slants—nor, heaven forbid, forgive. She just had better things to do than listen to Maggie's mess. What
else was there to say about it in Whaley's view but I'm right and you're wrong?

With her sister she knew where she stood. Boyd kept her guessing. Had she been asked, say by little Liz, who was known to ask her such, whether she liked a little mystery in a man, she'd surely have said, Oh hell yes, sign me up for the deep end, the more I knew them the more I need to be wanting to know about them, and it would have been true, for she'd never been with a man whose head and heart she didn't have figured out in a flat week, not to mention other parts of their body it took less than a day to understand. Now, though, with Boyd—it felt like he was pulling away from her a little each day, not so dramatically that she could see it in his eyes or hear it in his voice or God forbid feel it in his touch but detectable still in a way that got away with her terribly just because it was so slight, like the way the island itself was drifting every day a little bit southward, though to stand on her porch or, she'd heard, to fly over it in an airplane, it looked the same as it always had, ever since she could remember, ever since Whaley used to take her by the hand and lead her down the lane to see their aunt Mandy, who would let them dress her cats up in rags she swore belonged to the famous daughter of the vice president of the United States of America. And the island looked the same as it did when the vice president's daughter set foot on it, and yet it was a different island, or rather it was in a different place.

That was how it was with Boyd. He was the same but in a slightly different place. Wind in the night had picked up and moved tiny
parts of him, the equivalent of sand grains, atoms, molecules, droplets of water they claim humans are mostly made of.

Maggie stood looking at him one afternoon as they mended nets in Woodrow's backyard. He had his shirt off and she was admiring the ropey muscles that had strung up across his back and shoulders since he'd been out on the water. Well, that's good, she thought. At least there's more of him for the wind to take away. Might take a while longer than it would have when his rangy self first set foot on the dock.

“I know all about that time with Barry Railey,” he said.

She was stretching the net out, standing across the yard from him; there was some wind that day, and at first she thought the wind had picked up his words and twisted and mixed them, for he remained bent to his task until she did not respond. He looked up at her quickly, saw something in her eyes, dropped his own eyes to the net.

“Whaley told you?”

“Don't matter who. Matters who didn't.”

“What you heard is a lie.”

“Really?” He put down his end of the net, lit a cigarette, picked up his work again.

“I didn't throw myself at him if that's what you heard.”

“But you went off with him?”

“I was with him, yes. And I let him kiss me before I came to my senses and stopped him.”

“What made you come to your senses, Mag?”

Maggie looked across the island toward the ocean. More than anything she wanted her bask, the water on her shoulders, liquid heat and sea foam frothing around her.

“You're the one ran off to do God knows what across the sound. I don't like it when you're gone. It doesn't feel right over here.”

“I went to my cousin's baby's christening, Mag. I was gone three days. I asked you to go with me. Asked you more than once. I'm going to ask you again to come across with me, for good, but I'm not going to keep asking you over and over. We could never
be
over here. It just won't work. You won't let it. You're scared of your sister. You don't want anything to change. I have to stay in some black man's outbuilding. You get to come across the creek when you want, and then you cross over and who knows why you act like you do over here, but you do, Mag. As long as we stay over here, you're going to keep getting in the way of us.”

The woods Virginia led her through were a damn lie, Maggie thought, like the forests she'd seen in kids books, the pictures alongside the teaching sentences. Where was the brush and scrub so thick you had to hack at it with a machete to clear a path? In Virginia's forest the trees were high and far apart and friendly animals frolicked in deep blue shadow that flickered with sunlight through leaf canopy, and raccoons were sweet-eyed and never rabid, and snakes never hid beneath rocks but basked atop them like the tourists came to Meherrituck to burn
their skin lying half-naked on the beach. This is the way Boyd would paint it over there too. A fat lie to get her across. What would keep her contained in Morehead or little Washington or wherever else over there he wanted them to settle? Even the islands had bridges to the mainland and all that coming and going, all those roads and intersections. He was dead wrong: she could never be what he needed her to be over there. She could never stay still.

“No
place
is going to keep people who love each other from loving each other.”

“You know this how?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“I'm just asking,” said Boyd, “how you happen to come by that particular bit of wisdom.”

“You want me to have done everything in order to know it? Some things you just know. You don't have to have experienced them.”

She was lecturing him. In her tone she heard something that terrified her: her big sister's sanctimony.

“Well, if you love me, you can love me just as good across the water.”

“What about your family? I thought you came across to be where your father was raised?”

“True enough. But then I fell in love. I might would stay if it weren't for you. But we just cannot
be
over here. You won't allow it.”

“So you're leaving?” She turned away from him, dried her eyes on her T-shirt.

“I don't know,” he said. “No.”

“I don't know either,” she said, and then she felt it burn through her, the spite, the very thing that led her down to buy white liquor in some old boy's root cellar the moment he pushed off the dock that day.

“Seems like if you're going to leave me, well, seems like it'd hurt a lot worse then than now.”

“So you want me to go?”

“I don't. But I feel like everybody's against us. Everything and everybody.”

“You,” he said, dropping his end of the net in the grass.

“What?”

“You seem like the worst enemy we got.”

He got up and went inside, and she stood waiting for him to return—thought maybe he'd gone in for his shirt to protect against the gathering bugs, or had gone in to fetch himself something to drink—but he didn't come back and she did not go to him. Instead she went home and slept alone, thinking he needed to be without her in order to understand how much he missed her.

She let him be for the next few days. It wasn't easy, but she coddled the guilt he made her feel by calling her their worst enemy, and she spent her hours having conversations with him in her head, constructing arguments to prove wrong his notion that everything would be fine if only she'd come across with him. If at first it bothered her that her primary example of why leaving would be the end of them was well over four hundred years old, in
time she came to see Virginia's story as important to their own as Genesis in the Bible. It came first, and everything after was a continuation. Think what would have happened had Virginia just stayed put on this island where she had everything she needed. Greed's what led her to go across, and greed and vanity and pride is what killed her and the rest of them too. Talk about an original sin. Think about those Tape Recorders coming across wanting to know what it is to live here on this island, and Whaley spouting her history of ancestors and recipes and ways to ward off bugs when the truth was that me and you, Boyd, maybe we aren't even real people struggling with how to love but just another installment in a story started when some girl got restless and tired of the people she'd grown up with and lit out for afar. And look what happened to her. Boyd. Look what happened to all of them.